HENNIKER, NH — While Hector Xu was learning to fly a helicopter in college, he remembers having a few “bad experiences” trying to navigate at night.

These breathtaking flights led him to research unmanned aircraft systems while earning his doctorate in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, he created Rotor Technologies in 2021 to develop unmanned helicopters.

Rotor has built two autonomous Sprayhawks and aims to have up to 20 ready for market next year. The company is also developing helicopters capable of transporting cargo to disaster areas and to offshore oil platforms. The helicopter could also be used to fight forest fires.

For now, Rotor is focused on the agricultural sector, which has embraced automation with drones but sees unmanned helicopters as a better way to spray pesticides and fertilizers over larger areas.

On Wednesday, Rotor plans to conduct a public flight test with its Sprayhawk at an agricultural aviation trade show in Texas.

“People were calling us and saying, ‘Hey, I want to use this to dust crops, right?’ We would say, OK maybe,” Xu said, adding that they received enough calls to realize it was a huge untapped market.

Associated Press journalists were the first people outside the company to witness a test flight of the Sprayhawk. It hovered, flew forward and sprayed the tarmac before landing.

Rotor’s Sprayhawk helicopter, worth nearly $1 million, is a Robinson R44, but all four seats have been replaced with flight computers and communications systems to operate it remotely. It has five cameras as well as laser detection technology and a radar altimeter that make terrain reading more precise, as well as GPS and motion sensors.

At the company’s hangar in Nashua, New Hampshire, Xu said the technology allows for better terrain visibility at night.

One of the main attractions of automation in agricultural aviation is safety.

Since spreaders fly at about 150 mph (240 km/h) and only about 10 feet off the ground, dozens of accidents occur each year when planes collide with power lines, cell phone towers and other planes. Older, poorly maintained planes and pilot fatigue contribute to accidents.

A 2014 report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that there were more than 800 farm accidents between 2001 and 2010, including 81 fatalities. A separate report from the National Agriculture Aviation Association found nearly 640 accidents between 2014 and this month, with 109 fatalities.

“It’s a very, very dangerous profession and there are many deaths every year,” said Dan Martin, a research engineer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. “They make all their money in those few months, which sometimes means they’re flying 10 to 12 hours a day or more.”

Occupational hazards also include exposure to chemicals.

In recent years, safety concerns and falling costs have led to a proliferation of drones flying over farmers’ fields, Martin said, adding that some 10,000 will likely be sold this year alone.

“The market is growing exponentially, very quickly,” Martin said.

But the size of drones and the limited power of their batteries mean they can cover only a fraction of the area of ​​a plane and helicopter. This opens a door for companies that build larger unmanned aircraft, like Rotor and another company, Pyka.

The Californian company Pyka announced in August that it had sold its first autonomous electric aircraft for crop protection to a customer in the United States. Pyka’s Pelican Spray, a fixed-wing aircraft, received FAA approval last year to conduct commercial crop protection flights. The company also sold its Pelican Spray to Dole for use in Honduras and to Brazilian company SLC Agrícola.

Lukas Koch, chief technology officer at Heinen Brothers Agra Services, the company that purchased Pelican Spray in August, called the unmanned aircraft part of a coming “revolution” that will save farmers money. money and improve security.

The Kansas-based company operates at airports from Texas to Illinois. Koch doesn’t envision unmanned planes replacing the company’s dozens of pilots, but rather taking over the riskiest tasks.

“The biggest appeal is getting the pilot out of the plane in the most dangerous situations,” Koch said. “There are still fields surrounded by trees at all the borders, or there are very large power lines or other hazards, wind turbines, things like that. It can be difficult to fly.

But Koch acknowledges that autonomous aviation systems could introduce new dangers into an already chaotic airspace – although this is less of a concern in rural areas where there is plenty of open space and fewer people.

“Putting more unmanned systems into flight could introduce new dangers for our current pilots and make their lives even more dangerous,” he said. “If you have this full-size helicopter flying beyond your field of vision, how is it going to react when it sees you? What will it do? … It’s a giant question mark, which we take very seriously.

Companies like Rotor have built-in contingency measures in case something goes wrong: Its helicopter has a half-dozen communications systems and, for now, a remote pilot at the controls.

If the ground crew loses contact with the helicopter, Rotor has a system Xu calls a big red button that ensures the engine can be shut down and the helicopter makes a controlled landing. “That means we will never have an airplane takeoff event,” he said.

The safety measures will go a long way in helping the company gain what it hopes will be regulatory approval from the FAA to fly its helicopters commercially. Once they have that, the challenge, like

Xu sees it, it will intensify to meet demand in the United States but also in Brazil, which has a huge agricultural market but a more relaxed regulatory environment.

“I think 2025 will be production hell, as Elon Musk calls it,” Xu said. “It’s a bit like the difference between building a few and building dozens and hundreds on a large scale… They’re not just custom-built Rolls-Royces anymore. You want to eliminate them like you would to produce automobiles.